Good Day Today

 Director/Artist David Lynch released a piece of music called Good Day and created a competition to create the video. There were over 450 entries.

This is the winning video by Arnold de Parscau

The De Evolution Of Religion

this was a special request Go, Go, Gamera!

A Time For Outrage

This is the title of the English edition of Stephane Hessels best selling French pamphlet, Indignez-Vous. Stephane Hessel is the 93 year old Ambassadeur de France for life. He is a true hero of the French Resistance who was tortured by the Nazi's and escaped twice certain death in Concentration Camps. After the war, he was one of the framers of the UN Declaration of Human Rights with Eleanor Roosevelt.

He has always been an outspoken, true champion of the down trodden. At 93, he retains a childlike energy and mental acumen that rivals those as third of his age.
Though born of a German Jewish family, he has risked and been a target of the ire of the Zionists worldwide because of his passionate defense of the rights of the Palestinians. He has been criticized as a racist by his detractors who would silence him rather than be confronted with his accusations of Israeli outrages against the Palestinians. To quote his retort to his accusers, "My love of Israel is stronger than yours because I want it to become an honest country."
A Time For Outrage has been published in English and is available for $7.00 in America, but you can down load an english translation as a PDF. It is a slim volume but since it publication in France last October, it has topped the best seller list ever since then.

This little book argues that it is time for the French and all of us to become outraged and the sense of responsibility we all share as members of a connected world compels us to raise our voices and demonstrate to demand responsible change. Here is a  perhaps better translation.
His inspiration is the fuel for the Spanish Demonstrations this summer in Barcelona and Madrid. Every day there are growing demonstrations in Paris by ever increasing numbers of people inspired by his ideas. Perhaps the spirit of this true hero of human rights will wake the spirit of America and inspire moral, honest people to shed the feeling of hopelessness that has fostered the public lassitude that seems to haunt America. Indignant, honest people sure out number the artificially manipulated corporate entity known as the Tea Party. Once aroused, perhaps we can show the Tea Brains what a real majority looks like!

And only today, Aug 15th, 2011,  Stephane Hessel meets the
Dalai Lama in Toulouse.  Great to see these two together !

His latest pamphlet, Engagez-Vouz, or perhaps translated, Get Involved was recently published here. If you are interested, the French PDF can be downloaded. Engagez-Vous is concerned with responsible social protest and how we can use our voices to promote ecological concerns.
The passion of the man, who is actively using his stature and energy to effectively motivate a new generation is undeniably infectious...Hessel is a true hero of our time. 
Read about his remarkable life. His parents were the subject of Truffaut's classic film, Jules et Jim. When he was a child, his chess tutor was Marcel Duchamp. The video I embedded here was made last year.

KRAZEEEEEEE!

Remember, the last Iowa "Straw Poll" predicted that Mike Huckabee would be our president in 2008. Putting that into it's proper context, it really doesn't seem to surprising that in the fall out from the latest descent into the inferno of the middle American psyche, the foresnic evidence would only seem that the ...uhh...triumphant victory of  Michelle Bachmann would only confirm the diagnosis that something is really fucked...perhaps the medical term is KRAZEEEE? Yes, 9 out of 10 doctors would agree that America has gone completely fricking KRAZEEE.  Again, I am dedicating this song, originally by Cee Lo Green and the band Gnarls Barkely, Crazy as the the new theme song by the Republican Party in America. It seems almost a shame to waste the video of Ben L'Oncle Soul reinterpreting it by channeling Otis Redding, but it really rocks....
Meanwhile, let me destroy your day and perhaps keep you shivering in terror at night by providing these images of Michelle and Marcus Bachmann at the Iowa State Fair Yesterday eating foot long deep fried corn dogs...Please believe me that no photo shopping mischief was involved in here...but perhaps you might find this comment by Cher, yes, that Cher.. a person who might have a little insight into the nature of Bachmannian behaviorlism, relevant....

elect me you assholes, I'll do anything for a photo op....

remember, elect Michelle and it's a two for one...I'm her lord and master...
oh gawd...this corn dawg is making me KRAZEEEEEEEE!

Guitar Monsters

1996, Les Paul and Chet Atkins take the piss out of everyone!

Avalon...I just love Les' trademark line he begins his solo with.

Superman Takes On The Tea Brains

Two panels form a 1952 Superman Public Service Strip. The days when civic responsibility, the enoblement of society, the ultimate logic the common welfare insured the individuals welfare was considered patriotic rather than the creeping symptom of a subversive socialism agenda.
Today, the selfish, adolescent attraction of an ultimately socially destructive twisted fiction of masturbatory greed, Atlas Shrugged, has been embraced as the embodiment of the principles the Tea Brains espouse. 
In the long run, the principles espoused in Atlas Shrugged run counter to any theory or set of facts espoused by evolutionary and genetic theory. Atlas Shrugged was a fiction. If you want to learn about the basic principles of how we are genetically programmed to the real selfish act, altruism....
You would do a lot better to pick up a copy of Thomas D. Seeley's fascinating book, The Honey Bee Democracy. We could learn so much by emulating the behaviour, or by simply not thwarting the genetic programming innately within us that compels altruism as a strategy for specie survival.  
Here's the entire Superman strip from 1952...you can click on it to enlarge it.

Hylocereus undatus

Almost 20 years ago, while waiting for an order of Chinese Take out food on the corner of Ave. B and East 6th Street in The East Village, I noticed the slowly dying orchid cactuses that had looked so cool when the little place opened a year earlier.  I pinched a couple of branches and put them in soil in my apartment window. They began to grow and a few years later, the ceiling of the room they were in had turned into a real jungle of lush hanging orchid cactus branches.
One night I saw that they had developed buds. The buds got bigger over the next few weeks until one night, they started to open. The huge snow white flowers (6 to 7 inches across) open for one night.
In the jungles, the flowers are pollenated by bats. I didn't have any bats handy....

Dragon fruit for sale in a market.

When I moved to France, I took a few of the branches with me in my luggage. Now, I have another tropical jungle corner. The cactus is called a Night Blooming Cereus and is pretty spectacular. It bloomed this evening and here is a picture of one of the blooms. It has a scent and they really only last one night.
Because I have never pollenated the flowers, I never knew that they developed a fruit, but I have seen and bought the fruit in oriental markets for years. They are called Dragon Fruit or Pitaya...and have a taste like a kiwi. Only this evening, after taking the photos and doing a little reading did I realize that the Hylocereus undatus was the source of this rather spectacular exotic fruit...now, I'm going to try to pollenate them by hand and see what develops!

Patches

Well, I think it's country night here at thebrainpolice. This is from the 1994 one of the greatest classic crossover recordings of all time, Rhythm, Country and Blues, a project conceived and produced by Don Was. This is the Clarence Carter tear jerker, Patches performed by George Jones and BB King, embellished with layers of unctuous strings and gratuitous emotion by Mr. Was....

I Walk The Line

Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Two 1955

Meanwhile...

The cover of todays NY POST...this might be their best cover since the classic:

 Headless Body Found In Topless Bar!

Ganeesh! Do That Crazy Thing!

Ganeesh is the Hindu household good luck god.
He is the god of good vibes!
When we were trying to buy this house, living here, not knowing
if the deal would go through, my nephew sent us a Ganeesh
from Nepal.
We hung him up, facing the door and later that afternoon, the phone rang
and we had the deal.
I'm posting Ganeesh to bring good luck for the Democrats in the
Wisconsin Recall Election!
Hey Ganeesh! Do That Crazy Thing That You Do So Well!

wORd aUgUst 9, 2011

Orson Welles
uncredited publicity shot from the CBS Drama Anthology
1937

"Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they are failures. The ones who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem."

De Prejudice Of Deez Noo Nited Snates

Logic, a plan? There is no logic and the plan is to seize utter control by destroying and discrediting the Democratic Presidency of Barack Obama, by what ever means what so ever, even if it causes a historical financial debacle. It is so much easier if the Democrat is the first non caucasian to ever hold the office, because race and class warfare are the sharpest tools of repression.
Todays very bad example? A doctor who if he used his own political logic in his medical practice would probably be incarcerated for criminal malpractice. (sorry, doctors don't go to jail, they just go into the limbo of endless litigation, what ever)  Texas Republican Congressman, Michael Burgess who took office in 2003, stepping into the seat held by former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey stated at a Tea Brain gathering last week that the impeachment of Barack Obama "needs to happen" but when asked on what grounds, well, he couldn't really say.
He was being aggressively grilled by his audience in regard to his vote to extend the U.S. Debt Ceiling  Burgess rebuffed tea party members, insisting that allowing the nation to default would have been much worse than a credit ratings downgrade.

"I didn't want the country to go through what it is going through right now," Burgess reportedly said. "It's not the president's downgrade. The downgrade affected the whole country."

Representative Dr. Michael  Burgess
I pity anyone having this jackass as a doctor:
"I have to perform surgery on you...but I don't
know why"

That vote shouldn't have come as a surprise to tea party Republicans. In times of less dire financial straits -- namely when the Republican party controlled Congress and the presidency -- Burgess was in favor of raising the debt ceiling every time he was asked, voting yes in 2003 and in 2004, and additionally voicing support for increases in 2006 and 2007, though official votes were not taken.

All told, Burgess has been in favor of raising the debt limit over $3.3 trillion to finance everything from foreign wars, massive, budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations and an unfunded prescription drug benefit plan that prohibited the government from negotiating for lower prices. Had he come to Washington just two years earlier, that figure would likely be closer to $4 trillion, which is approximately how much Republicans added to the nation's debt limit from 2001-2008.

But it was his vote on the most recent increase that sparked the tea party's ire. Responding to questions, Burgess reportedly vowed to resist future debt ceiling increases, saying that Congress should instead try to amend the Constitution to force balanced budgets and stave off future tax increases.

That position became a favorite among tea party supporters toward the end of the debt limit debate, with some even suggesting that Republicans could force the Senate to accept the plan. That argument faced several logical barriers however, being that constitutional amendments take years to complete and must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The next debt ceiling increase will be taken up by Congress in 2013 -- well before an amendment could be accomplished. 
But when up against a wall, the worm crawls into the nearest hole...as the discussion degenerated into a lynching party demanding that Obama be impeached. He readily jumped on it and agreed.

 "It needs to happen, and I agree with you it would tie things up," he reportedly said. "No question about that."

The U.S. Constitution, in Article II, Section 4, requires a conviction on "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" before an office-holder can be impeached. President Obama faces no such charges.

Asked to clarify, Burgess said he "wasn't sure whether the proper charges to bring up articles of impeachment against Obama were there", but he didn't rule out pursuing such a course.

(the illustration is from a great Basil Wolverton comic strip from 1954,  They Crawl By Night, which creeped me out many years ago and still does! To see it in it's entirety click here!"

THE GUNS OF BRIXTON

Cameron begged for the riots and now he got them full in the face....Paul Simenon wrote this song 30 years ago and it is more relevant even today. The Clash is still one of the greatest real revolutionary rock bands of all time and David Cameron is about to become a tragic footnote in British history. 

But then he was just another posh toff who cruised through the elite British Class Caste system, an over priviledged mediocre private school bully who really never bothered to learn history. Now he's being forced to eat it!

Tender/Surrender

Well, here is Steve Vai, the man Frank Zappa referred to as his stunt guitarist playing Tender/Surrender from his 1995 recording, Alien Love Secrets. Can a human actually have a meaningful and rewarding sexual relationship with a guitar? 

please, excuse me, i didn't mean to go off, but sometimes those frikin tea brains

U Kin Smell The Stoopid...

Uhh, maybe that's not just the stoopid, I think we just had a massive Depends Fail...They should spend a little more on sanitary facilities if they are gonna be bussin a butt load of tea brained senior citizens around Wisconsin for magic media moments like this...

But when did America care about facts, or real history anyway? Corporate American Greed is all about manipulation of idiots, keepin you dumb and in the dark. Only property owning citizens of the correct class, gender and ethnic persuasion are entitled to the right, and it is a right, to vote...RIGHT?


There was no hue and cry when George W Bush was doubling the national debt. Bush started two illegal, unpaid for wars, gave huge tax breaks to the wealthy and instituted a pharmaceutical benefit for seniors that was again unpaid for. All these programs which were inherited by Obama were based on borrowed money and hence their net effect was simply to increase the national debt. In order to get the national debt under control all that would be necessary would be to reverse these Bush era programs, but Republicans want to stick Obama with these Bush institutionalized deficits instead. Republicans and Democrats went along with all this dutifully raising the debt limit whenever Bush asked them to. Now Republicans are screaming bloody murder about the debt, but they have not deinstituted Bush's programs that are still causing it. They haven't let Medicare negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical industry; they haven't done away with the Bush tax cuts although Obama has tried to get them to. Instead, they put Obama's back to the wall and demanded that the Bush tax cuts continue. They are due to expire at the end of 2012, and that is the primary reason why Obama insisted on a debt ceiling deal that would carry us through 2012. If there had been another debt ceiling fiasco around Christmas of 2011, Republicans would have held Obama hostage over the Bush taxs cuts forcing him to not let them expire or they would shut the government down. The current debt deal wisely avoids this scenario. Obama is trying to wind down Bush's stupid wars in a way that doesn't raise Republican ire, but he is not doing it fast enough. They are still consuming far too much money.
The debt ceiling deal provides for a commission that will get absolutely nowhere which will result in an automatic spending trigger which will provide for significant cuts to the Pentagon in addition to scaling back social programs. The fact that there will be significant cuts to the Pentagon is a stroke of genius on Obama's part. So I don't think the debt deal was such a bad agreement from Obama's point of view. He managed to put off the most significant cuts in social programs until the "out years." This means that nothing much will happen until after the next elections. If Democrats win big at that time they can undo whatever damage was done by any deals they made with Republicans. Nothing is set in stone that the next Congress cannot fix.

The Republican modus operandi for some years has been to vote against anything that would make a Democratic President look good in order to get the American people to vote against him in the next election putting a Republican in the White House. So this creates the conventional wisdom that a Democratic President doesn't know how to get anything done no matter how good his ideas or proposals are. Democrats have then obligingly gone along with Republican Presidents to get things done because they are not quite as venal and dastardly as Republicans and are more interested in helping out the American people. Consider Richard Nixon. Although no dirty trick was beneath him in order to obtain the Presidency, Nixon governed as a liberal. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, ushered in the first Earth Day, made an opening to the Chinese communists, something no Democrat would have dared to have done because of the expectation of a huge Republican outcry, tried to put together a National Health Care plan which was cut short by his impeachment, imposed wage and price controls, created Supplemental Insurance Income and on and on. The Republciacn MO in those days was to give the American people what they wanted but only when a Republican was in the White House. Otherwise, fight against any improvement in the lot of the American people thus convincing said people that the only way to get anything done was to put a Republican in the White House.

Then along came Jude Wannisky with a better idea, the Two Santa Claus Theory. The part about resisting any progress when a Democrat was in the White House remained the same. But instead of governing as a liberal, what the Republicans would do was to give everybody a tax break and put it on the American credit card. The idea was to run up the debt as much as possible, spend like a drunken sailor, create the ambiance of prosperity and then scream bloody murder about the debt after a subsequent Democrat was elected President. This would put Democrats in a bind because they would not be able to implement any social programs such as those implemented by Nixon. Their only job would be to clean up the elephant poop after the parade was over. This would further contribute to the conventional wisdom that the only way to get anything done was to elect a Republican President. This worked because Congressional Democrats were not as shameless as Republicans and would go along with Republican initiatives, if they thought they would benefit the American people, even when they did not hold the Presidency.

These techniques have been raised to an art form under the Obama Presidency. Republicans will not let any legislation pass that would in any way be considered a victory for Obama even if the legislation represents Republican ideas and no matter how much the lack of it harms the American people. By so doing they hope that the American people will blame Obama for not getting anything done and not notice that the real reason nothing gets done is Republican Congressional obstructionism. Even when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, as they did during the first two years of the Obama Presidency, Republicans used the filibuster in the Senate to prevent a whole slew of legislation, such as the legislation that would have closed the loophole giving tax breaks to corporations that ship American jobs overseas, from getting passed. Now that they control the House, their mission is even easier. They simply will not bring to a vote any Democrat inspired legislation, or if they did, they would simply vote it down because they have a majority. They don't even need to use the filibuster.

Only this time, after they get a Republican elected President in 2012, he or she will not pull a Nixon and govern as a liberal. Their far right philosophy is too much ingrained for that to happen. This time, even though the American people might be yearning for a "can do" President, what they will get instead is the opportunity to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. If Republicans control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency after the 2012 elections, what the American people will get is the complete elimination of all social programs unless Democrats use the filibuster in the Senate to stop them. They will get lower taxes for millionaires and billionaires and higher taxes for the poor and middle class. (Expect payroll taxes to increase.) They will get class warfare in the extreme while being called out for engaging in class warfare themselves by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. One Republican tactic is to accuse the other side of doing the very thing they themselves are doing. The Tea Party will stop worrying about the National Debt because that will be what their minders want them to do. Instead the push will be on for "revising" Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, deregulating corporations, lowering corporate taxes while lobbyists drill new loopholes in the "lower" taxes, privatizing public schools, parks, libraries, fire and police forces, getting rid of unions and converting all public employee defined benefit pension plans to 401ks. What's happening in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and some other states will have been only a prelude to what will happen on a national scale. The American people, despite opinion polls to the contrary, will not figure into any Republican calculations and their way of life will be decimated before their very eyes with them powerless to do anything about it. This is the morass that the conventional wisdom - that a Democrat can't get anything done while a Republican "can do" - will lead us into. This is the race Mitt Romney is gearing up for.

While the Republicans in Congress are determined not to give the Obama administration any "victories" which might actually make the lot of the American people better, and to force his back to the wall and demand that he implement the Republican agenda, the American people are too dumb to figure out what's happening. They will be swayed by the billions of dollars which will be poured into TV advertising that Obama's administration was a bust and that, in order to have "Morning in America," they must elect Republicans in 2012. If they are so led and if they so comply, they will be treated to Republican economic policies which will eliminate even more American jobs while creating tons of them overseas, the homeless population will mushroom, middle class people will be forced out onto the streets in droves while the economy goes into a tailspin. But while this is happening corporate balance sheets and CEO salaries will continue to skyrocket. Any talk by Democrats of a "jobs program" will be branded as socialism. The next Republcian President will fill a couple of Supreme Court vacancies with hard right Republicans thus guaranteeing that Republcian policies and laws will prevail into the next millenium. Any agencies that protect the American people will be defunded even if they are allowed to continue to exist. Workers will lose all the rights that their forefathers fought so hard for. Federal tax receipts will come less from corporations and billionaires and more from the working poor. The sick, the elderly and the disabled will have to rely on church based charity and forego any hope of help from their government. Hoovervilles (Romneyvilles?) will spring up all over the country.

Republicans are recreating the Great Depression and doing it with a vengeance. Their policies are ideologicaally based, not pragmatic, and they are bound and determined to thwart the will of the people in order to create a libertarian utopia. It doesn't matter to them how much harm they do to the average American or what the average American wants from government. Their mantras of small government, privatization of any and every public agency or program will carry the day despite any cost. According to them the Great Depression should have been allowed to proceed as long as corporate profits were up. The fact that unemployment was 25% was no big deal. Their advice to the unemployed: "Get a job, you lazy, shiftless suckers!" The prison-industrial complex will continue to expand especially for people of color who will find themselves incarcerated for drug offenses and petty crime while fraudulent bankers and rating agencies will only be bailed out when they get in trouble. Thus a libertarian utopia will have been achieved in which there is a small class of very wealthy people while the vast majority becomes increasingly immiserated. Sure, there will be a few lone voices crying out in the wilderness, a few disgruntled people who won't go along with the Republican program. They will be characterized as losers, socialists and people who have renounced the American dream.

wOrD AUg 8, 2011

cretin

1. one underdeveloped mentally and physically, from French and the Latin for Christian.

2. no, seriously.